03 June 2008

Gone With The Borscht

Warning: If you are too mature to appreciate a good bowel movement story, just move on to the next blog...there is nothing here for you today.

A friend of mine at work - who mercifully has no idea this blog exists - shared a story with me today that begs to live forever in the blogosphere.

So yesterday Friend notices she's peeing pink (I warned you this is a toilet story). She doesn't remember drinking a bottle of Boone's Farm and asks her significant other if his pee is slightly...rosie. Like a guy would admit that he's pissing pink. No such luck.

This morning, pink has turned decidedly sepia-toned. Now she's worried. She calls the doctor's office and is told to come in on Wednesday morning for a urinalysis. The reception person - or whoever she was - makes it sound like a bladder infection. No big whoop, but still she's worried. Sepia is way beyond the normal pee palette.

Later that day she consumes what she claims was an enormous quantity of sweet tea (read: caffeine). Not surprisingly, soon thereafter, she makes her way to the bathroom where she...how to put this delicately? I can't repeat what she said...she is moved, if you will. And said movement is - purple.

W.T.F?! Not just purple. Puce. No, not puce...Magenta.

Ho-ly...crap. Now she's scared. Magenta "make" cannot be a good thing. WTF kind of freaky tropical disease has she picked up that has caused her body to produce tempra-paint colored...stuff? Liver failure. It has to be liver failure. She's been afraid this would happen someday and is momentarily CONVINCED she's going to have to find herself a brand-spankin' new liver. Can you still procure human livers domestically or will she have to go to India, or the Philippines?

And then it hits her.

The beets.

Apparently Kroger had a hell of a special on beets because she cooked up a mess of them and consumed them - lunch and dinner - for two days.

So she goes back to her office (this is where I come in) and Googles...well, you know what she Googles.

And right there, on the Internets - God bless those tubes - listed under the litany of dreaded kidney and liver diseases commonly associated with these symptoms is a list of outside influences that can turn...potty...purple: Certain drugs, food coloring and - ta da! - beets.

So as I hum "We Got the Beat" she calls the doctor's office where, unfortunately, the actual nurse - who has known her for her entire adult life - answers the phone and wants to know exactly why, young lady? she is cancelling the appointment. At this point she retells the story only this version concludes with the root vegetable self-diagnosis.

The nurse is laughing so hard I can hear it from the other side of the desk. Friend is absolutely mortified. She hangs up the telephone and glares at me. You know the look. The Hairy Eyeball because, of course, I'm now in full-out Belinda Carlisle mode, including the kick-dance.

At which point this very proper Southern girl looks at me and deadpans, "Well, can you beet that?"